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HMDA/CRA: Geocoding
 The regulations implementing the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) require financial institutions to report the geographic location of their loan applications or collateral for residential and/or commercial mortgages, other consumer loans, small business loans and small farm loans. To comply with these requirements, commercial and mortgage banks use a process known as geocoding to convert or translate ordinary street addresses into a series of alphanumeric codes representing the corresponding Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) State and County codes, and the applicable decennial U.S. Census' census tract codes. For example, the geocode for RATA's offices at 1916 Boothe Circle, Longwood, FL, 32750 is:
36740 12 117 0215.04
where "36740" is the MSA code for Orlando, "12" is the FIPS state code for Florida, "117" is FIPS county code for Seminole County, and "0215.04" is the census tract code for our Lake Mary neighborhood.
Regardless of whether a HMDA or CRA reporting institution chooses to geocode its lending data using an internal solution, a fully outsourced solution, or a combination of internal and external processing, the federal and state supervisory agencies to whom these data are reported are very demanding in their standards for the accuracy and completeness of the geocoded data submitted to them. In working with these regulators over the years, RATA has coined the term, Compliance-grade™ geocoding, to reflect the high geocoding standards of these agencies. Address files geocoded to Compliance-grade standards will:
• Reflect data definitions for the current reporting year only
• Contain geocode results for every address record processed
• Have no detectable errors
• Have a verifiable precision level of 95% or greater
• Contain geocode results that are traceable to the address matching engine and reference file used to produce them
RATA offers two Compliance-grade geocoding products: GeoPlus and Residual Address Matching (RAM). GeoPlus is RATA's premier geocoding product and is best suited to those financial institutions that prefer to fully outsource their geocoding needs. RAM, in contrast, is best suited to those institutions that prefer to internally geocode a portion of their lending data, but that do not have the resources to resolve the unmatched addresses that a single-source desktop geocoder typically produces. Please see our GeoPlus and RAM product information for more details.
GeoPlus
 GeoPlus is RATA's premier Compliance-grade geocoding solution for Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and/or Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) reporting institutions of all sizes. GeoPlus is the answer to your institution's geocoding needs if you prefer to outsource this processing rather than internally purchase and maintain a mainframe or desktop geocoder; train and retain an experienced staff of geocoding analysts; and purchase and maintain address reference data, Census Tract books and maps. GeoPlus delivers high-quality, cost-effective geocoding through RATA's experienced staff of geocoding professionals, while freeing your resources for more productive activities.
GeoPlus processing is accessible through RATA’s COMPLY™ Suite, the HMDA/CRA compliance industry's leading desktop software solution. GeoPlus is very easy to use. After you import your lending data into the COMPLY software, you simply export the address data components from your selected loan file(s), and email the data to RATA for processing. RATA's geocoding staff does all of the tedious geocoding work for you, and returns the geocoded records back to you by email when our processing is 100% complete. You then apply the geocoded data that RATA provides as an update and the job is done. It's that simple!
With GeoPlus, you send us your address data for geocoding at your convenience, and according to your own processing schedule. RATA processes GeoPlus files in 5 day windows. You can submit GeoPlus files for geocoding weekly, monthly, quarterly, or at year-end only, although we urge all of our customers to send us their address data throughout the year to avoid regulatory scrutiny and the pre-submission rush during February.
High quality, cost-effective, easy-to-use, convenient processing … when it comes to geocoding, what more could you ask for? How about guaranteed results? That's right. With our premier geocoding product comes RATA's GeoPlus Guaranty. In the event that a GeoPlus customer's supervisory agency identifies suspected inaccuracies in RATA's geocoding results, at our own expense, RATA will defend our geocoding results, methodologies and safeguards against such geocoding errors. Providing that the customer maintains reasonable procedures of their own to avoid geocoding errors, as specified in the customer's GeoPlus contract with RATA, and the customer's supervisory agency determines that RATA's geocoding methods are not sufficient to warrant treatment of any geocoding inaccuracies as Bona Fide errors, which are not violations of the regulation(s), RATA will pay up to $50,000 (Fifty Thousand Dollars) of any civil money penalty assessed to the customer that is directly attributable to RATA's geocoding.
But what does all of this cost, you ask? Your costs for GeoPlus processing consist of a COMPLY software license fee and volume-based geocoding fees. The total volume-based fees are determined by applying a per-record rate to the total number of address records that you submit for geocoding. RATA utilizes a graduated per-record rate schedule offering progressively higher discounts for larger volume customers. GeoPlus processing requires a pre-payment of your volume-based geocoding fees based on your own estimate of the annual record volume you expect to process in the current processing year.
We hope you agree that you won't find a better geocoding value for your institution anywhere. For GeoPlus pricing and ordering information, please contact our Geocoding Services department.
Full Service Processing
 If your institution prefers to totally outsource your Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and/or Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) reporting responsibilities, RATA's Full-Service Processing is the right compliance solution for you. It really couldn't be any easier for your institution. You send us your lending data, and RATA does everything else. Our skilled professionals perform the tedious tasks of converting your data to the proper submission format; geocoding the property addresses; edit checking and correcting any errors; and then preparing and submitting the proper transmittals, HMDA LARs and/or CRA Composite Loan data to your supervisory agency. RATA has provided this service continuously since 1987, and has remained current with all of the reporting requirement changes since then. With Full-Service Processing, you can be confident that your HMDA and/or CRA reporting will be right … the first time, and every time. Here's how Full-Service Processing works:
- You send RATA your institution's HMDA and/or CRA loan file(s) either monthly or quarterly, depending on your supervisory agency's requirements.
- RATA converts your applicable loan data to the required submission format(s).
- RATA performs all of the Validity, Quality and Syntactical HMDA Edits and CRA Edit Validations on your file(s), and then sends you a report(s) of all errors identified.
- Your staff researches the identified errors, determines the correct information, and either corrects the loan information on your host system (sending us an updated loan file) or directly sends the hard copy corrections to RATA.
- RATA geocodes all eligible records to Compliance-grade standards.
- RATA calculates your Rate Spreads using the latest Treasury Tables.
- RATA performs its own proprietary validations to identify missing or incorrect information.
- At the end of the year, RATA re-runs all data validations routines on your file(s), and coordinates the correction of all remaining errors.
- Finally, RATA prepares the required transmittal documents and properly formatted submission files, submits your data 100% error free to your supervisory agency, and sends copies of all files created and used back to you.
Full-Service Processing is priced according to a graduated per-record rate schedule, offering progressively higher discounts for larger volume customers. Our standard Full-Service Processing price schedule applies for clients that license these services before December 31 of the current processing year. After that date, an additional, per-record express processing charge applies to newly licensed customers. For Full-Service Processing pricing and ordering information, please contact our Geocoding Services department.
RATA's Full Service processing is available to all institutions with an annual HMDA or CRA volume of 5,000 submittable records or more.
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